Beyond Good and Evil
by Lunatique
Summary: Seifer is sentenced to death for his actions during the war. Slight Seiftis overtones, character death.


_Disclaimer: I swear I don't own 'em. _

**Beyond Good and Evil**

Sunlight-illuminated dust drifted silently through the air, golden motes of light here and there amid the drafty gloom that stretched far up to the ceiling of the great hall. A few coughs and whispers barely ruffled the dank silence of several hundred individuals come to watch the inevitable.

Once there might have been anger in that crowd, indignance, hatred, any emotion to color that grey-shadowed hall a different hue. But in the course of three months and the glut of evidence and arguments barely challenged, any interest or drama that might once have pervaded the packed seats of the courtroom had bled away until today, the passive crowd sat as if at a sordid but not particularly rousing sideshow.

Today, they knew, they had come to see him hang.

* * *

"This court is ready to give a verdict," the presiding judge said disinterestedly to an equally disinterested crowd, then turned bleary eyes to the defendant's seat. "Do you have any final words to address to the court, Mr. Almasy?"

All eyes were on the defendant, who seemed the only flash of color in the dreary room despite his slight pallor from months of imprisonment and the pale-blue prisoner's uniform. His arms slung over the back of his chair and long legs stretched before him, he had the same look of mild amusement with which he had regarded the whole of the proceedings.

"Yes, your honor," he said, the respectful words belied by the hint of a mocking grin in his voice. He rose with a scrape of his chair and sauntered confidently to the witness stand before the court bailiff could reach him. He sat himself down at the stand and faced, eyes gleaming, the spectators who seemed suddenly a bit more alert than before, a little jolted out of their dull comfort and irritated about it.

"You've heard," he began without preamble, "the evidence against me for the past months. Assuming you stayed awake through all that, of course." He smirked at the few quiet, quickly-stifled chuckles. "You've been told I have a history of violent and disturbed behavior, that I'm a sick, deranged animal. The only surprise was that I didn't turn into a mass murderer even sooner than I did."

The court was quiet, but it was no longer the silence of stupor. For the first time their eyes bore into this young man as if to read his very soul behind the calm face and the matter-of-fact tone. The judges sat up a bit straighter, the chief prosecutor stopped polishing her glasses, and the rest looked on, more intent than they had been for a long time.

"I just want to make this clear," the defendant's quiet words were loud in the hushed silence, "that all of it is true. Every word."

The crowd let out a collective breath of betrayal, relief, surprise... Whatever they had expected, tears or apologies, repentance, ranting, anger, this was not it.

But at least it was interesting. And whatever else could be said against him, the defendant always knew how to make things interesting.

"I also want you to know," the young man raised his voice over the clamor, which immediately died down: "That I don't regret any of it. Not a single thing." Angry murmurs, open resentment, shouting.

Life was draining back into that gloomy hall of grey-toned hues. Shadows seemed to deepen and lights to sharpen. People became animated, faces contorting, mouths moving, hands making rapid gestures. He watched all this, and grinned in glee.

"Because, how many of you can say you stopped pining and whining about your life long enough to go out and do something about it? How many of you," he continued above the noise and the emotions that filled the hall, its former languor shattered beyond repair, "were so true to your dumb fantasy that you went for it, fuck the consequences?"

And as he sat there above the crowd he was inexplicably majestic, vividly alive as he could not and _should_ not be. Color seemed to emanate from him to the far corners of the room, painting the dinghy spaces with bold, primary strokes of gold and green.

"I did everything I set out to do and I have no regrets. Which is more than I can say for you people." His complete lack of remorse shook all present to the core. Had he no decency? Yet the fascination was real, the stirring of the once-stagnant atmosphere.

"And someday," he told his seething audience, "when you're sitting in your little homes leading your little lives, I guarantee you'll think of me from time to time, the little punk who got himself killed out of his own stupidity. And you know what?" He grinned. "You'll wish you could be him, when all the responsibilities and petty boredoms become too much even for you. And you'll never admit it because you may be breathing, but you don't know shit about how to live."

They muttered angrily now, resentful that this man, this _criminal_ would dare to talk to them this way. Jeers and shouts followed the defendant's path back to his seat. He had ruined their show and shaken them up, and they didn't like it one bit.

Except for that particular diversion, the rest of the proceedings went as expected. In the case of Seifer Almasy vs. the Gardens of Balamb, Galbadia, Trabia, and the Governments of Balamb, Esthar, Fisherman's Horizon, and Galbadia, on seventy-six counts of murder, treason, conspiracy, assault, use of weapons of mass destruction, crimes against humanity, crimes against unarmed populations, etc., etc., etc., we find the defendant guilty. The court sentences the convicted to death by hanging.

* * *

Commander Squall Leonhart of Balamb Garden, in a far-back row, let out a long breath and hunched down to rest his chin on clasped hands. At the front of the room the convicted man stood to let the guards take him back to his cell, making some comment that had them chuckling ruefully as they handcuffed him. A slender beam of sunlight glanced briefly off his bright hair, and then he was gone. The audience left one by one, thoughtful and subdued as they had not expected to be, talking in low voices among themselves.

Squall stood to leave, only to catch sight of a tall blonde sitting several seats down. Her thoughtful cerulean eyes lingered on the door that the prisoner had just been escorted through. She turned their eyes met briefly; they looked away at the same time and left separately.

* * *

"And you'll need to sign this one, too, Commander."

Squall took the paper from his assistant and flipped indifferently through it, scanning all the signatures already put down--Margaret Colie, Speaker for the Communal City of Balamb; Laguna Loire, President of Esthar; Noah Dobe, FH Mayor and Stationmaster; Richard Caraway, President of the Republic of Galbadia; Caia Halden, Headmistress of Trabia Garden; Maddock Martine, Headmaster and Garden Master of Galbadia Garden; Xue-Fang Li, Headmistress and Administrative Leader of Balamb Garden...

The only dotted line that remained blank was to the right of "Squall Leonhart, Commander and Contingency Leader of Balamb Garden."

So much ink, he thought, to hang a man. But then again, he supposed they all wanted the satisfaction of signing the permission to execute the Sorceress' Knight. Some more than others, anyway. He imagined them as they signed this document, Martine coolly exultant, Xu professional and businesslike throughout, Caraway--Richard, he corrected himself--reserved yet firm, Dobe hesitant but decisive in the end.

He scribbled his name on the dotted line and wondered what he was supposed to feel.

He handed the document back and threw down his pen. "My schedule for today, Johann?"

"A meet-and-greet at fifteen hundred with this year's class of hopeful," a quirked eyebrow, "gunblade users, sir, and the foreman of the hangar construction crew is coming in at sixteen forty about structural concerns. At seventeen hundred a bladesmith from Dollet is scheduled to see you about a contract..."

It hadn't taken long for Squall to discover that the job 'contingency leader' meant being handed over any and all drudgery Xu was too busy to handle, as long as the matter pertained to emergency or armed conflict, however indirectly. And of course, anything to do with the Ragnarok or gunblades fell to him. At least the Headmistress herself was even more swamped than he was, and he allowed himself a brief moment of satisfaction at the fact.

_...sitting in your little homes leading your little lives..._

Squall willed the mocking voice out of his head, and concentrated instead on the recitation of his schedule.

"...dinner with President Caraway at twenty hundred." The assistant concluded. "Any modifications or cancellations, sir?"

"None," Squall said brusquely. "Dismissed."

_...when all the responsibilities and petty boredoms become too much even for you..._

He let out a soft growl. "Shut _up._" Johann threw him a startled look, which he irritably waved away. He snatched up his pen in search of something else to sign.

_I guarantee you'll think of me from time to time._

* * *

It was past midnight by the time Squall made his way to the brig, tired from the interminable dinner with the general, tired of being probed by words and veiled meaning where the personal met the political. Give him his gunblade and something to kill with it and he was in his element, but God! Having dinner with the father of his intended was an unendurable chore.

The guard on duty sat on a chair in front of the door, snoring softly with his chin on his chest. Squall cleared his throat, and the boy stood so suddenly he almost lost his feet again.

"I'm sorry, visiting hours are ov.." He trailed off as he saw who was standing before him. "Commander Leonhart, sir!" He snapped off such an unnaturally smart salute that Squall wondered if he didn't do some muscle damage.

"At ease," said Squall, returning the salute. "I'd like to see the prisoner."

The guard nodded eagerly and slid open the small window in the cell door. "Commander Leonhart to see you, Almasy." His pompous demeanor vanished rather quickly at the nonchalant answer from the other side of the door.

"Oh, thank God. I was going to cut your scrawny throat out of sheer boredom."

Squall took the guard's place at the window just in time to see the prisoner tossing aside what looked like a long strand of hair. "Shigawire." Squall tried to hide his startlement from the eyes that stared out of the cell, two points of vivid jade-green against a sea of standard-issue blandness. "Looks like I was just in time." The guard gulped audibly behind him.

Squall slid the window shut and turned to the guard. "Let me in."

"B-but Sir!" The kid's eyes were like saucers, golden freckles standing out against his pale face. "The prisoner is a-a-armed, and danger-"

Squall blew his hair away from his face, a rediscovered habit since the end of the war. "Give me your keycard," he said with forced patience. The guard remonstrated for all of two seconds before he handed it over. Squall swiped it through the slot and threw it back over his shoulder without looking, absently telling the guard something about being excused for twenty minutes. The kid was long gone by the time Squall had closed the door behind himself.

* * *

Stretched languidly on his shelf bed, Seifer was playing with the piece of wire again, long fingers deft around the razor-keen strand that could sink through human flesh clear to the bone.

"Out of curiosity, where did you get that thing?"

Seifer looked up as though aware of the other man's presence for the first time. Meeting Squall's eyes he ran a finger thoughtfully down the shigawire, drawing no blood from the feather-soft contact.

"Look, when Michael Shinozaki, SeeD rank 15, comes to tell you about how he misplaced his shigawire because he took it out of designated areas to impress his dream girl--" Seifer held out the shigawire, which Squall gingerly took. "By all means bite his head off and spit it across the room. Just don't make him cry, all right?"

Squall simply stood looking at him. Seifer looked well-fed and well-rested, his movements free from the awkwardness of injury. In the first few weeks of his incarceration at Garden unexplained cuts and bruises had tended to mar his skin: The guards had offered little explanation and Seifer none at all. Those were all long gone, except a small scar on his cheekbone from when he'd fell and clipped it, the guards had claimed, on the edge of his bed.

Squall looked down at the piece of deadly wire in his hands and thought he knew what kinds of emotions had caused Seifer's injuries. Numerous pictures and films had been shown in the course of the trial--glassy eyes of children dead from the missile strikes, rows upon rows of body bags.

(Electric shocks of pulsing agony, and he'd been helpless to stop the pain. Helpless.)

It took a moment to snap himself out of it. Sometimes he wondered if he had ever left that hour of his life behind. The pain had been hard, true, but being unable to do anything about what was being done to him, suffering at the will of another had been what made the experience truly brutal.

"Gonna garrote me with that?" Seifer's quiet words broke his train of thought. "Damn, but I always wanted someone my equal to end me. And, uh..." He gave an apologetic grin. "You're not it."

Squall looked blankly down at the piece of wire in his hands and then stuffed it carelessly into a pocket, cursing under his breath when it made a tear in his glove and cut his fingertip.

"It really doesn't matter to you, does it." Squall's voice made not even a hint of an echo in that hollow space. "Life or death, or right or wrong."

"There was something I wanted to do, and I went for it." Seifer hunched forward to rest his elbows on his knees, eyes still on Squall's. "You wouldn't understand," he said, almost gently.

"The prosecution was right about you." Squall gritted his teeth against the rage that rose like bile. "You really are a dangerous animal."

Seifer shrugged. "I was always a killer--I never hesitated." His eyes were clear again, like in the days before the sorceress. That unnervingly straightforward gaze with the feral gleam always disconcerted, fascinated and repelled. What Squall saw in those eyes was always a love of thrills, of skill and challenge. The eyes of a killer who reveled in a good fight.

Not the eyes of the kind of killer that killed children.

Or the eyes of a torturer.

"You-" Squall had to stop himself from staggering back. Looking, really looking into those eyes for the first time since the war, unclouded now and clear, he realized the source of unease he had felt throughout. The jagged edges of awareness crashed together like the pieces of a puzzle, leaving him reeling in the wake of terrible realization.

"The Sorceress did control you," he gasped out, struggling to breathe normally. "You'd never kill unarmed civilians, you would never have used missiles--not enough of a challenge, too boring." _You'd never torture._

Finally he saw what it was, the nagging little suspicion he had tried to ignore, the truth he had not wanted to see for the vengeance that had clouded his sight. The hint of a whisper in his mind that had made him stop by the supplies room on the way here, barely knowing why. All there, clear as day the moment he'd stopped to actually _look..._

Seifer clapped slowly. "Bravo, Leonhart. I knew you, of all people, would figure it out."

The next instant, in a surge of anger, Squall had grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, forcing him to stand. "You bastard. You _bastard,_" he ground out. "I signed your execution papers, for Christ's sake!"

He slammed Seifer hard against the wall next to the bed, looking with burning eyes into Seifer's calm ones. "You made us kill you when we shouldn't. Why?" Slam. "You give some fancy speech about living, all the while seeking suicide by court?!"

Seifer threw out an arm, tossing Squall back. "'Cause breathing's not living, Leonhart." His voice heavy and raw, eyes piercingly bright, Seifer faced him without fear or remorse. "It never was for me."

"Why?" Squall asked, emptily.

"What else would you have me do, _Commander?_ Spend the rest of my days hunted or locked up? Always with the knowledge of how I whored myself to the witch--not just my body, not just my mind, but my SELF?" His eyes were green fire against a face gone white with rage. "Answer me!"

Squall lowered his eyes from the intensity of that gaze, Seifer's question still ringing in his ears and in the air.

_(unable to do anything about what was being done to him, suffering at the will of another)_

They had known the same pain, the same kind of brutality. Of _course_ he, of all people, was the one to figure it out. And because of that shared agony Squall found himself choking on any eloquent gems of inspiration he might have tossed out, forced to fall back instead on the hollow, uninspiring truth.

"Most of us live in some kind of bondage," he said at last, more to himself than Seifer. "We all sell something in exchange for security. To live."

"Not me." Seifer's eyes, when Squall looked up slowly to meet them, were quiet again, a sea in the aftermath of raging storms. "I knew what I had to do the moment I saw Garden fly over the docks at Dollet. I knew this was what I wanted, and I went for it. As I always did."

And somehow Seifer seemed again regal and proud in his rumpled prisoner's uniform, unarmed and condemned to die. Squall noted the quiet dignity in the man's face and bearing, and knew despair.

_We all want to be him,_ he thought, _and we never will._

He remembered the guards' simple camaraderie with Seifer as they brought him in from the courtroom, how the "mysterious" cuts and bruising had stopped with no official intervention. The man before him caught the eye and held the spirit, for better or for worse--a bearer of the unexpected and a ruffler of calm simply by being who he was.

He was going to miss that about the guy, he noted with some surprise.

Wordlessly he thrust his hand at Seifer for a handshake. Seifer looked at Squall's hand, then searchingly at his face. Finally he took the offered hand and they shook briefly, eyes meeting for a split second in understanding before they broke the contact.

Squall turned briskly and rapped at the cell door, the guard's anxious eyes peering briefly in before the door slid open. He did not turn as he asked the final question: "Incidentally, why come back in the first place?"

"Closure." Came the ready answer. "This is where it all started, and here it ends."

Squall nodded and took a step towards the door.

"Oh, and Leonhart?"

He paused to indicate he was listening.

"The joke's on you. All of you." There was no mistaking the laughter in Seifer's voice.

Squall recalled the months wasted on the trial, the mountains of evidence that the prosecution had paraded before the court. The media reports, the commentaries, the street protests... Seifer had played them all, to the very end.

"Yeah." He shook his head, smiling ruefully to himself. "I guess it is."

He stepped through the door and let it close behind him, leaving the prisoner behind without a second glance. And the prisoner was a free man to the last.

* * *

Fred knew something was wrong the moment he entered the cell, after the prisoner hadn't answered repeated calls to come to the door for breakfast. The trainee guard had looked like he might faint if forced to go in and check on Almasy so Fred was here instead, nervous and shaken without knowing why.

"Hey, Almasy?" Fred called tentatively to the still figure on the shelf bed, the blonde head turned halfway to the wall. He had come to know and, God forbid, like the man after a fashion, but Seifer Almasy still wasn't the sort you could let down your guard around. "Alma-"

Then it hit him suddenly, why all of this felt so terribly wrong: There was a smell like almonds in the air, only bitter.

He took one more unsteady step. One look at the prisoner's flushed face and he was out the door, calling frantically for a doctor.

* * *

"This is so boring," the cadet complained. "How would we ever know how he sneaked cyanide into his cell?"

"Be quiet, Seanna." Quistis didn't spare the cadet so much as a glance, her entire attention focused on the grainy black-and-white footage on the screen before them. The prisoner eating; the prisoner reading; the prisoner lifting dumbbells... she found herself admiring the sleek fluidity of his movements in even the most banal tasks, that careless grace that conscious effort could never hope to emulate.

"But he slipped shigawire off Shinozaki, the weapons expert!" Seanna's voice took on a distinctly whiny tone. "Why not cyanide?"

Quistis paused the CCTV footage and fixed the cadet with a look that made her go quickly quiet.

"Let me refresh your memory, Seanna," Quistis said evenly, a tone anyone in Garden with half a brain knew to be afraid of. "Garden-brand cyanide capsules, carried by SeeDs on highly classified missions, are catalogued and tracked. Individually. No one takes or returns any without a record."

"Yeah, but... we were going to kill the traitor anyway, weren't we?"

Quistis sighed and tuned the girl out, focusing eyes and attention on the screen. The last days of Seifer's life continued to roll on before her eyes, up to the second from last. She brought up the footage from his last day alive, not having found anything so far to rouse her suspicions.

She watched him start and lead the day just like his other days in captivity, ones she had come to know intimately through the tapes. He ate, worked out, used the washroom, talked to a guard, left for court to hear his sentence, fished Shinozaki's shigawire out of his pocket and fiddled with it...

Caught up in the now-familiar rhythm of his days, she almost didn't realize that the man who had just entered camera range was not a guard.

_Squall._ She hadn't known he had visited the prisoner the night before.

Why hadn't he told her?

Alert now, she watched their tense confrontation(their angle relative to the camera just wrong for lip-reading: deliberate?), Squall throwing Seifer against the wall, Seifer pushing him off, the ensuing détente of sorts, and--

--their handshake.

She went rigid in her seat, staring fixedly into the screen until Seanna called her.

"Lieutenant-Commander, ma'am? Are you-"

"What? Oh." Quistis started. "I'm afraid my mind wandered." On screen, Seifer was pouring himself a glass of water. She hit the pause button, reluctant to watch him take the poison. "Your services are no longer required, Seanna. You may go."

The cadet didn't need to be told twice. She was gone by the time Quistis had started rewinding the tape.

She rewound back to the point of the handshake, paused, started again in slow motion, rewound back, scrutinizing the sequence over and over.

After nearly an hour she finally stopped the tape. Her thoughts were grim as she leaned back into her chair.

* * *

Squall, looking up, seemed unsurprised at the sight of her bursting into his office, the commander's assistant hot on her heels for not having an appointment.

"Why?" Quistis strode to his desk and placed her palms squarely on its polished surface, her face inches from his.

"You're excused, Johann," said Squall, his eyes on Quistis'.

"But-- Lieutenant-Commander Trepe-"

"In fact," Squall interrupted, "why don't you call it a day. The paperwork isn't going anywhere." When Johann started to protest Squall added in a tone that brooked no opposition: "Good night, Johann."

Once the assistant's footsteps had retreated down the hall, Quistis eased back from Squall's desk. Eyes never leaving Squall's, she dragged a chair to his desk with a foot and seated herself.

"I hope for your sake Xu never finds out how you doctored a very sensitive inventory." Quistis held up a printout. "You would have gotten away with it, too, if I hadn't been looking specifically for an anomaly."

Squall pushed his work aside, leaning back to bury himself in his chair. "Blackmail, Quistis?" A rare smile hinted around his eyes, but was tempered by a hard edge.

"I suppose I'm not cut out for it." Quistis shrugged with deceptive nonchalance. "I 'accidentally' covered your tracks."

"That's good to hear. You always had the better head for details."

Tense moments passed in silence while they silently gauged each other, whether each could implicitly trust the other.

Finally Quistis said again, quietly: "Why?"

"It felt wrong," Squall said simply. "For someone who lived only by his own will to die by anyone else's. Like seeing an eagle trapped in a birdcage."

"I thought you, of all people, would have liked to see justice served."

Squall spread his hands. "What's justice? He had a way of blurring the edges... And he always wanted to die at the hands of an equal." He actually smiled a little, as though at a private joke.

Quistis raised her eyes to see the darkening splay of colors across the sky outside. "You haven't been to see him? The...body?"

"I'm not sure I want to." His eyes took on a faraway look. "I want to remember him as he was alive."

"I suppose that's the difference between us." Quistis stood, straightened her skirt.

"I'll put a message through for you to the morgue." Squall picked up a telephone receiver.

She had just reached the door when he cleared his throat behind her.

"Quistis?"

She turned to look at him, one hand already on the door.

"I'm going to miss him." An unmistakable sincerity there, earnest and wistful.

Quistis smiled at him and pushed past the heavy doors, into the cool shadows of the hallway beyond.

_So will I._

* * *

She stood looking down into the cadaver's face. She had not expected him to look this way in death--jade-green light glittered from under half-lidded eyelids, a trace of a flush still suffusing his cheeks with color. Well-shaped lips curved lightly in a taunting smile as though to mock her, mock all those who strove to control either his life or his death... And failed on both counts.

He was even more beautiful than he had been in life, and she found some relief in the fact.

Hesitantly she reached out to stroke a hand down that familiar face, cold now as marble, some inner fire gone from him. She had never thought it possible of someone so full of life. She stood alone in the silence of the dead all around, dreaming of what might have been.

Finally she bent down and kissed him, his lips icy hard against her own living flesh. The cold, sharp taste of death stung her and she savored this last memory of a life that had slipped through her fingers, a spirit of fire and quicksilver that she could never tame.

Slowly she straightened and walked away, back into a life of responsibility and service that seemed as dreary now as it was fulfilling. Gradually the concerns of everyday life--lesson plans, reports, papers, briefings, meetings--reasserted themselves at the forefront of her mind.

Yet when she closed her eyes she could see him, the eagle uncaged, soaring out of sight into the furnace-fires of nameless desires and wants as he always had, beyond all mere thoughts of good and evil.

-the end-

* * *

A/N: Good old Nietzsche. I never did understand him, though I did steal his title. "Shigawire" is from the great Frank Herbert's _Dune_ series.

Big thanks goes out to Kitian from Seiftis Forever for giving some really good input, it helped a lot.


End file.
